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South Africa’s Gold Fields profit jumps on rising Bullion prices

Via Reuters

Via Reuters
  • Gold fields interim profit up by 300%
  • Higher interim dividend revealed equal to total dividends declared last year
  • Higher gold prices boost future dividend potential
  • Lowers 2020 output guidance

Expect this kind of pciture to be repeated across gold miners as long as bullion prices remain supported.

Traps and Pitfalls:

  1. Bad Markets – A good pattern won’t bail you out of a bad market, so move to the sidelines when conflict and indecision take hold of the tape. Your long-term survival depends on effective trade management. The bottom line: don’t trade when you can’t measure your risk, and stand aside when you can’t find your edge.
  2. Bad Timing – It’s easy to be right but still lose money. Financial instruments are forced to negotiate a minefield of conflicting trends, each dependent on different time frames. Your positions need to align with the majority of these cycles in order to capture the profits visualized in your trade analysis.
  3. Bad Trades – There are a lot of stinkers out there, vying for your attention, so look for perfect convergence before risking capital on a questionable play, and then get out at the first sign of danger. It’s easy to go brain dead and step into a weak-handed position that makes absolutely no sense, whether it moves in your favor or not. The bottom line: it’s never too late to get out of a stupid trade.
  4. Bad Stops – Poor stops will shake you out of good positions. Stops do their best work when placed outside the market noise, while keeping risk to a minimum. Many traders believe professionals hit their stops because they have inside knowledge, but the truth is less mysterious. Most of us stick them in the same old places.
  5. Bad Action – Modern markets try to burn everyone before they launch definable trends. These shakeouts occur because most traders play popular strategies that have been deconstructed by market professionals. In a sense, the buy and sell signals found in TA books are turned against the naïve folks using them.

With each new trade we must believe the following:

1.  Consistent profitability has nothing to do with our predictive abilities.

2.  With each new trade we cannot place any undeserved significance (e.g. “this is the perfect setup”) on its outcome.

3.  We cannot expect the trade to do anything for us other than provide the information needed for us to either hold or exit.   The process by which we have determined our trade setup will also be our guide for exiting (win, lose, or draw).

4.  We accept that we have control over the process but absolutely no control over the outcome.

5. We accept that our current trade setup may look exactly like past opportunities, profitable or not, but may produce an entirely different result due to the collective beliefs and decisions of other market participants.

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